Head in the Clouds: SaaS, PaaS, and Cloud Strategy

Day one of the OpenStack Conference got off to a flyer of a start with a pair of keynotes both provocative and enlightening.

First to the mic was Chris Kemp, OpenStack co-founder and co-founder and CEO of Nebula. His points were simple – OpenStack is a stack, not a product. He pounded on that theme throughout his keynote.

To that end, he explained that the idea of OpenStack is that of a cloud ecosystem designed to be an open space for partners to collaborate.

Kemp argued against a recent report from Gartner analyst Lydia Leong, stating that he did not think that OpenStack competed with VMware or Amazon Web Services. After his speech, he repeated the point in a tweet, saying “Today’s #OpenStack, VMWare, & AWS ecosystems are (and should be) complimentary – each are optimized for different applications”

In his speech, he said that VMware was solving a very different problem than OpenStack. Kemp said that VMware has done a good job taking 25 years of legacy software and making it run in a static environment.

“Enterprise applications don’t like agile and dynamic. They are designed to be static,” Kemp said.

He added that while Amazon’s implementation was innovative, that the steps it took into cloud computing were “evolutionary, not revolutionary.”

Following Kemp was Zorawar “Biri” Singh, senior vice president and general manager of HP Cloud Services. Singh gave an overview of HP’s cloud strategy, discussed its partners and announced that public beta would begin on May 10.

Singh said that HP was active in OpenStack’s project policy board and that the company was open and ready to learn from its consumers.

He spoke on the “paramount” importance of APIs in a world where communicating between clouds will become critical and said that HP was coming from a point of view that, “standing up VMs” is a “2009 phenomenon.”

I was able to sit down with Singh for a one-on-one after his keynote and will have more on HP later.

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